Several of you have been trying to book to attend the Braided Rivers Seminar 2019 and have discovered that it’s been booked out and waitlisted. This happens every year, and unfortunately there can be no ‘standing room only’ this year due to the Health and Safety (including security) requirements of the venue. To that end, closer to the date, I will be contacting everyone who has booked to attend and asking them to confirm their name so that we can issue nametags. Only those with nametags will be able to enter, so please do respond or it will be assumed you are not coming and your place given to someone else. If you know now or at anytime in the next few weeks that you are unable to attend PLEASE let me know as we have 15 people waitlisted. If you are a no-show, that means someone else will have missed out. I apologise for this stringent requirement, but I’m afraid we now live in a very different world.

The BRIDGE project & High Court decision defining a ‘river bed’

Unfortunately, as many of you will be aware, some newspapers have reported remarkably one-sided information regarding ECan’s public meetings to define braided rivers. The devil is in the detail, of course, and there is no room in this newsletter to tease apart and examine the complex issues, but I have commented on those specific to the Bridge Project here In Defense of Braided Rivers as Public Goods, concluding, ‘…accusing ECan of attempting a ‘land grab’ because they’re endeavouring to protect our public goods, is an Orwellian inversion of reality, one where doublespeak is used to defend the destruction of what’s left of globally rare braided river ecosystems for the short-term corporate and/or personal profit of a few.’ The latest reports (links below) on biodiversity loss only serve to underscore the situation.

To Dam or not to Dam

One of the arguments against dams as a source of ‘renewable’ energy, has been the quantity of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, that dams produce over their lifetime (due to dam-waters drowning plant matter that then decays). There are many pro/con dam arguments. Under a changing climate regime, for example, the pro-dam argument is that it provides a more reliable source of water (via storage) and reduces the risk of flooding (via controlled release). Here in NZ, dams that ‘control’ braided rivers, by definition change their naturally dynamic hydrology.A recent open access paper in Nature comes up with an entirely novel pro-dam argument: dams are good because by controlling waterways, they destroy methane-emitting (think ‘swamp gas’) wetlands, and they prevent widespread floods that in turn lead to further methane emissions from vegetation destroyed by floodwaters. The arguments are almost as compelling as they are insidious (much like the ‘more CO2 means faster plant growth’ specious argument from fossil-fuel lobbyists). See here if you’d like to know more (includes the links to the research papers).

BRaid’s next meeting

The next BRaid meeting will be at 3.00pm, 24 May at the DOC offices Nga Mai Road, Sockburn. You do not have to be a member to attend and we would love to see you there.

Membership Renewal is due at the AGM September each year. If you are not already a member of BRaid, you can join as a General, Casual, or Representative member. General Membership is a modest $20/annum, giving you voting rights and the opportunity to have a say in BRaid’s activities.